More compression news!: https://github.com/Cyan4973/zstd declared its format stable a couple days ago, getting a step towards 1.0. In the example there, it's a little denser than gzip -1 and a lot faster, and includes entropy encoding that uses finite state machines (and that I don't truly understand--maybe there's some similarity to lzfse there). It can look at your data and construct a static dictionary, which sounds cool for tasks like packing a bunch of 4kb database pages.

(https://github.com/google/gipfeli is another compressor aiming at that general space ('fast but not Snappy/LZ4 fast'), but I don't think it caught on much.)